The 1952 Radiotron Designers Handbook

Me too, courtesy of Jim (the man) Mayer. :>)

Not bad, at 78MB. Too bad it's not iPod viewable. Also, too bad it's not OCR'd and Acrobat searchable.

THAT is a LOT of material!

...Jim Thompson

Good grief, how many megabytes in total?

John

here:

martin

I just put it on my Ipod

martin

Like I said, not bad, expecially for such a big book (my copy is 1500 pages and 3-1/4 inches thick). All the files consume only 78MB. Impressive. But having all these 1500 pages of scans reveals to me once again why it's so valuable to have an actual printed copy.

Thanks again to Jim (my main man) Mayer.

Actually, not a whole lot. I have it, and have browsed through to see what's inside, but I never refer to it. I think you need to be a toobhead to care about all the arcania about output transfornmers and stuff.

Reference Data for Radio Engineers is a *good* oldie!

John

I've found the detail in the FM detectors section to be quite useful in creating one on a chip.

...Jim Thompson

Ditto.

What is it good for?

I think transmitter people may still look at it from time-to-time, but very few people work at that.

I use my copy now and then. But I use both my copies of Terman's book, about the same vintage, frequently.

Do you prefer the old Green Brain or the newer Blue Brain?

Jim

Better yet, run it through Adobe's Capture OCR processor, which automatically places the searchable text right under the scan.

Green for sure. The newer editions (especially the latest, "Reference Data For Engineers Who Are Afraid Of The Word RADIO") are full of chapters of topical, qualitative, useless stuff like nuclear reactors and programming and digital logic.

John

One of the things it does is tell you, in considerable detail, what an ordinary AM radio an an ordinary medium-fidelity audio system have to accomplish. That's useful information.

On 26 Aug 2005 18:21:16 -0700, Winfield Hill wroth:

I traded my copy of "The Big Red Book" to Win for an autographed first run copy of AoE III. To be delivered at an undisclosed future date.

I'm using a scanned copy of TBRB that I found on a CD. It's very well done, but still a scan with no search index. That's not too great a problem for me because I'm very visually oriented and I can remember just about where in the TBRB I saw something. That makes finding things easier.

See "picture memory/thinking" at

Jim M*e*yer

I got my Radiotron Designer's Handbook about ten years ago, for $2 at a used book sale at a university.

When I was a kid in the early seventies, the book was legendary. But I never looked for a copy, and this had to be one of the few times I've come across one used in all those years. At least, I wasn't looking for it.

It isn't all that useful, because it's about tubes and because it's covering topics that I'm not interested in much.

But, one thing about old books is that they often cover their territory better than later books. When something is new, they spend the time explaining things, and there may be more variety in solutions.

Once something has become common, there's often an expectation that everyone is at the same level of understanding, and the field has solidified so the also rans are either not mentioned or just glossed over.

People don't have much need for superregenerative receivers, but if you do, Terman's "Radio Engineering" or even the Radiotron have far better explanations than more recent books where they may not even be mentioned. The more detailed information is mostly in magazines from the era where the scheme was current.

Another example is single sideband. I have a few books about the topic from the fifties, when amateur radio was really making headways into it. Although basically collections of magazine articles, they cover the topic so much better. There are always newcomers to a topic, but after a while the stuff gets hashed too much and the other details are compressed out. The phasing method fairly disappeared from the ham books, which perpetuated a lack of interest. Ironically, the scheme reappeared decades later, with solid state and more importantly digital techniques that made it easier to implement. Yet I'm sure as people started re-examining the topic of phasing generation of SSB, they had to look to those old books for information, because it wasn't in the current books.

So when I got my Radiotron Designer's Handbook, I gave it a prominent place on my shelf. I don't refer to it much, but I'm really glad I have a copy (and glad I got it so cheap), and if nothing else, it looks nice to have on the shelf, with some other books that deserve the same place.

Michael

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But given that someone has done the work of scanning the book, it would be relatively easy to work on the index. Get a few people to each take a page or two of the index, turn it into html, and then use that to point to the relevant section. Wouldn't get you right to the page, but easier than poking through pages trying to find what you want.

Michael